Sticks

By Sarah-Clare Conlon

I’m grappling to catch in the void the invisible white thread of the other-worldly, which vibrates and from which facts and dreams escape with the sound of a brook running over small pebbles, alive and precious – Alberto Giacometti

Weird waters swirl,

mineralised aquamarine

or cobalt or cyan channels,

sweeping loosely, ghostly,

bluely, around pebbly shoals,

more pebbly shoals than water.

Sticks and stones, bare

broken bones shattered,

scattered. Battered bark-

stripped branch-lines

bleached by sun, wind:

discarded antlers,

cigarettes.

Creaking cracking crunching

at cofferdams and debris traps,

wedged on world’s-end islands,

crow-snagged once-trees—

like a darkroom negative

white for black,

black for white.

Clothes pegs, pencils, paper straws.

Twigs, trunks, siltbank littering.

Skeletons, shipwreck ribcages,

tattered flume-fashioned logs

run aground, anchored, abandoned

on short-stay.

flash flooded reefs,

more pebbly shoals than water.

Sarah-Clare Conlon has been writer-in-residence at Ilkley Literature Festival and Victoria Baths in Manchester, where she lives. Nominated for the Wainwright Prize, her latest pamphlet Wanderland (Red Ceilings Press) was a Poetry Book Society Summer 2025 Listing. It follows Lune (Red Ceilings), Using Language (Invisible Hand Press) and cache-cache (Contraband Books), plus prose chapbook Marine Drive (Broken Sleep Books). She is currently working on Drought Thoughts, an Arts Council-awarded project.